A Time For Reflection

 It's been over a week now since The MTA announced that it was closing in Sept 2022. That's a week of everybody including me attempting to process the news.

Having bizarrely gone through this week last year too I'm struck by how different it is this time. Maybe of course because last year as soon as we announced it some hope materialised within days, so it never really felt real at all.  

Last time we knew that this was coming. We'd had months recognising that the problem was real, with weeks passing before people applied to join us. It was inevitable that the closure announcement was going to come.

This year the hope came before the announcement, which somehow made this feel all the worse. You see even though we'd lost a benefactor there was always the hope of the Trinity validation pulling through for us, after all, as I've written about a fair few times now, the evidence from the day of the assessment and subsequent assessors coming to see our shows was overwhelmingly positive.  Literally, hours chatting to the main assessor both on the day of the pre-validation assessment and even before had clearly raised no red flags at all (and trust me when I say that I'm always on the lookout for red flags). The assessor (John Gardyne) clearly understood what he was talking about, and was hugely diligent in his dealings with us. 

We always knew that we needed 3 things to survive beyond this year, and we knew that we could have survived with 2 of the 3 things in place, we didn't need the full house. The 3 things were simple, additional funding, the cohort size returning to pre-pandemic levels and the all-important validation from Trinity. Now 1 and 2 and intrinsically linked - which John completely understood. If there were no major issues on our course and we were able to whiz through the validation process, for the first time since 2018 we would have been in a position to offer assistance with fees.

For background from 2011 - 2018 we were able to offer students help via a government back Professional Career Development Loan - the PCDL. Whilst not massive - just £10K/student, we saw our applications increase once we were in a position to offer that help. Interestingly the criteria for that loan was determined by a government office all based on paperwork and stats, ensuring that we weren't some rogue organisation.

I had attempted to shout loudly when the PCDL was suddenly pulled with no warning, and have subsequently continued to scream into the abyss like some harbinger of doom with vocational training's death knell ringing loudly into my own echo chamber, but nobody listened. They all just turned away because it didn't impact them. We were after all an outlier of a college so we were hugely insignificant. Our problems were exactly that. . . "our" problems.

Anyway, back to 'now' and our situation, suddenly being able to apply for a validation that could access the Advanced Learner Loan, a loan worth £22k/student for us, was clearly going to be a game changer. Even taking into account the current cost of living crisis, the increased competition within the training market, the number of phone calls and conversations on lives on various platforms was proof if proof was needed that having an ALL attached to the funding options for the course was going to completely put us back on track. We 100% had to get through another year with a teeny tiny cohort which was always going to be a challenge BUT there were ways and means around that. Our business plan was going to look hugely different with that student funding stream secured, meaning that we could have looked to the bank to help us through the 2022-23 academic year. My wife and I were still down as guarantors for loans taken out by the college, and we had already discussed the possibility of guaranteeing a loan to get us through the next year. There was no way that we'd do it without the validation in place though as we had already loaned the business a lot of money back in 2015 to facilitate the move to our new premises and that money was still in the college, so we would have had to be really sure of success before committing even more finance.

So with all of these "knowns" in place, we had hope in abundance. For sure with each passing week that Trinity failed to send us the report that hope waivered. We needed to move onto the full validation assessment with a real urgency in order to secure it and advertise the fact that our training came with some form of student funding. 

When the report landed in July a few days after having made a formal complaint to Trinity about the 4 months of delay, it was devastating to discover that the report that was presented to us bore no relationship to the report that was verbally discussed with me back in March. In fact, I barely recognised the college within that report.  Over the past week, we've released that report to our students & graduates (as I've always believed in completely transparency), and they are equally bemused by what they've read. 

You see #theMTAway truly is unique, and unless you've taught at the college or been a student there or, like John, spent hours trying to understand how it worked, you just couldn't blag a report on it. Well. . . I say you couldn't, somebody at Trinity has clearly given it a bloody good go.

So this year's closure does feel vastly different - but predominantly because this year's closure is unfair, and whilst we all come to terms with that, the fact that a major organisation such as Trinity has not only failed to own up to their part in our demise, but rather lie even further in the most ridiculous of press releases that salt is being rubbed rather harshly into the wounds. 

They have just 9 more days to present the findings of their external arbiter, plus 9 days to present the full report - complete with our 6 pages of corrections. I'll say it again though - a report on our training cannot be blagged, it's a unique 2-year training programme so unless they've found the original report or at least spoken to our original assessor this is all going to get very messy. THAT'S why this year feels so different - we're definitely closing, but the post-mortem into why we've been forced to close is going to drag on for months, and eventually, I know that we're going to be vindicated, at which point that hope will turn to despair at all that we might have been and all that we've lost. The loss of a truly unique college amongst the homogeny of training available, the loss of free training & rehearsal space for our graduates, the loss of a creative hub for new writing, and that's before you even start to count up the financial cost of it all that, wages, redundancy monies, lease, deposits, damn it. . . even our loan.

We're over. . . but we're not

Out of Control

As we're about to enter another milestone in the Pandemic lockdown, so it seems that the conspiracy theories and speculation about what the future will look like spread quicker than the virus itself.

In the past few days alone I've heard how we're all being brainwashed by the mainstream media (or MSM as the enlightened few all seem to call it - which is ironic as that acronym alone sounds like some dodgy news channel), I've read articles both quoting and misquoting the 'people in the know' as they've fundamentally hypothesised about what the future might look at, as I've read the threads of people's reactions to these hypotheses as though they were now facts.

Similarly, I've read the opinions from my industry peers - the optimistic chant of "we'll be back stronger than before after all theatre always survives" being seen in equal measure to the "this is the death of theatre as we know it". The headlines telling us almost daily that a vaccination or a treatment is seemingly days from being mass-produced to the headlines telling us that a vaccination or treatment will never be found for this constantly mutating virus.

Right now we have a Prime Minister speaking on Wednesday in Parliament stating he's about to start to 'unlock' the lockdown almost like a trailer for his much-publicised televised speech this weekend, yet on Thursday, one day later, Scotland declared that they wouldn't be changing anything soon, quickly followed by the Boris dep of the day telling all of us during the daily briefing to not change anything until Boris says so, followed on Friday, just 2 days later, by Senedd Cymru declaring that they weren't really changing anything either.  It's like we're suddenly in the middle of a game of Boris says but they forgot to tell us the rules, scrap that, it's like they forgot to tell Boris the rules!

In other words - the world is suddenly very confusing. We're all trying to work out in the first place who to believe. We've watched the mainstream media and noted how it's not actually covering some of the horror that UK people are living through whilst gleefully giving us a good news story every day, so we've glanced at the right & left-wing propaganda in a bid for clarity, come up with a few theories of our own based on a hunch and ended up exactly where we started. . . nowhere.

So we start to look closer to home as the global picture is too vast to comprehend.  We look to our friends and families but of course, relationships are complex at the best of times. So it's somewhat alarming to see how our peers and families are dealing with the current uncertainty, plus of course, there's a strong chance that we're physically separated at the moment from our 'go-to' people. The friends and families that can talk us down when things are feeling huge. Even worse than that lots of people are locked-in with the people that pander to our acting out giving us tacit permission to be 'however' we need to be without challenging us whilst thinking that they're helping us. I would suggest that a room full of 'yes people' is exactly why we're in the mess that we're in right now. Not being challenged and binary thinking helps nobody to evolve.

For a lot of people in our industry our work also tends to be an anchor during stormy seas - but now the unthinkable has happened, the show just didn't go on. It literally stopped overnight.

Or to put all of this another way, our lives are no longer within our own control. I can't go back to work until the government tells me that I can. I can't go to my 'escape' - the theatre until the government tells the industry that we can re-open.  So whilst we're essentially freer than ever before - no time restraints for anything, we are of course straitjacketed by the pandemic.

So we speculate.

We each have a different approach to trauma - which after all, that's exactly what this is for all of us. Some people like to look at the worst-case scenario and then be pleasantly surprised when things don't end up so bad, some people need to be eternally optimistic about the future, refusing to see any liquid left in the glass at all, let alone leaving us with a glass half empty. Then there are all the people straddling optimism and pessimism in equal measure and who enjoy exploring that dichotomy aloud.

The thing that we never take into account though is how everybody else is hearing 'our process', and indeed what is the agenda of our public statements (sometimes known, sometimes subconscious)  Throw into that mix a health mix of social media bots and aggravators and we're in a heady mix of chaos right now. 

Somebody throws out their 'theory' or speculates on when the theatres will be up and running and literally everybody jumps on it. Either doing the 'I knew it' line, or doing the 'how dare you write this down line'. Yet for all the 'noise' out there (and boy is there a lot at the moment), you'll always find an opinion or a piece of speculation that will fit your current thinking, allow you to think that somebody somewhere does know what's going to happen next, and therefore you throw your social media support behind them.

The truth is scarier right now though. None of us can predict the answer. None of us truly know whether people will flock back to the theatres relieved to finally get that escape, or whether they'll stay away in their droves. We don't know if 'normality' will happen this year, next year or indeed if we'll need to adjust to a different normal from before. Already I find myself being caught off guard if I see people on the TV greeting each other with any sort of physical contact. Suddenly a handshake seems like a daring move, yet just 2 months ago this was my regular greeting and had been my entire adult life

So I guess that's the crux of it, isn't it? We will all adjust. Life (for the majority of us) will continue and we'll learn to adapt. In order to preserve our sanity maybe that's enough of a surety to help us see our way through the chaos?

Oh to have a grant to cut

So according to The Stage today 4 of the more established drama college Principals have taken a public viewpoint on the government's plans to scrap student maintenance grants: https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/2016/drama-schools-warn-grant-cuts-will-hit-poorest-students/?utm_content=buffer1a193&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

At the risk of being controversial (which I know is very unlike me), this Chicken Licken response to the news is, IMHO likely to do more harm than the scrapping of the grants in the first place.  Mountview, LAMDA, Rose Bruford and RADA Principals are now all on record practically telling the poorer students that it's now impossible.  Yet speaking as the Principal of a college that receives nothing by way of grants etc (our students are only eligible for a PCDL), I know that it is possible. Rose Bruford's Principal rightly comments on the hours that a drama student has to do, and mentions the difficulties of getting part time work around that.  Interestingly they mention the Drama UK 'standard' of 30 hours/week, yet our students do 40 hours a week and several of them have had to manage a full time job around the demands of the course.

Is that ideal, is it fair? Absolutely not.  However is it what they needed to do to survive and qualify...yes.  Have they gone on to have successful careers, we're on about 50/50 odds with that one, with one of them dangerously close to 'pushing' through the system to get quite a big break sooner rather than later. However regardless of their success right now (and I'll state really quickly that all have worked, my reticence on the subject is financially has it been worth it for them..yet), they are all determined to succeed.  That tenacity along with their talent will ensure that they're OK eventually.

Just to be clear I'm definitely NOT backing the government on this, however what I am saying is that every time they cut some arts funding or support, and we bleat about it, and point out to the world that the impossible has suddenly become harder, someone, somewhere will give up on their dream. So the government win.

I appreciate that we're in a very different position - we don't have anything that they can cut, but over the past 7 years I have written so many letters to so many organisations asking for just a little help so that we can help fund those students that are financially independent. Every time a letter comes back saying no.  The only difference in 7 years is that the letters of rejection have become nicer, acknowledging our success, but, for whatever reason, they have chosen not to support us.  Every time I receive one of those letters I get angry, because I think about the student who is working stupid hours to stay with us, and I get cross because we can't give them as much help as I want to, because not one person would help us.  I moan on FB (although I've been told off about that now), I moan at work and at home...but this year I finally realised that me moaning achieved nothing...except that I probably wasn't giving the best of myself to the college on that day, because I was cross with a faceless potential benefactor, who decided to give £££'s to one of the colleges moaning in The Stage today over giving a little bit everywhere else.  So I didn't take a wage for a bit longer, or we scraped through somehow together...and every one of those students graduated.

Today the colleges will moan, tomorrow a celeb will tell us that the working class actor and the working class theatre died a bit yesterday because of this news.  Yet isn't it time that we got real too? We don't get a 'get out of jail free' card because we're studying the arts.  How many other courses does this ruling have an impact on? The difference being of course that nobody cares about the lawyers/solicitors/surveyors etc who equally have to face the impact of less funding.  Yes they might work less hours so they can choose to work extra shifts after college - but then to be honest, why aren't those students bemoaning the ridiculous hours that they're at college studying? £27,000 to have 10 - 12 contact hours a week is surely something to protest about? Yet we hear nothing?

So to be clear...I marched in protest when Student Loans were about to be introduced, I took part in the college occupations of the late 80's (admittedly back then, not necessarily understanding the full impact of what was happening, but definitely understanding enough to camp down for a night or two), I willingly got frog marched out of a classroom a few years later when the next wave of cuts were coming in and the occupations started again (hell I even told the students who frogmarched me outside my studio, where the other staff would be...so I was practically a spy for the revolution).  I only got through college because I had a grant. Although even that annoyed me - seeing other students whose parents easily had a load of money, enjoying their termly jackpot, because their parents knew how to fill in that form, they knew how to 'present a truth', whereas my parents went for absolute honesty, resulting in me have around a tenth of some of my much wealthier contemporaries. I have said time and time again that I could not have been able to have afforded to go to my own college, had it existed then.  So politically don't be telling me that I haven't got a clue, or quoting Churchill and his infamous 'arts' speech to me.  I've been there and worn the T shirt.

However, having lived through that time, and seeing that it made no difference at all.  Everything that I protested against happened.  If I could rewind the clocks I'd protest again, but make the calling more vehement...but even then I know that we would have lost the case.  However we have NOT yet lost the young performer that can't afford to come to us.  Somehow we always will make it work.  Surely our job is to inspire the next generation and fight for them, not go on the record and tell their family and friends that they just as well give up now.

Please stop saying that it's tough for the working classes. It's tough for everyone that chooses to go into HE today. The arts are not the only ones that are impacted by this ruling.  So how about the headlines for the next wave of cuts (and goodness knows...there will be more to come)...is just a graphic...an international sign that states quite succinctly that we won't be beaten....regardless of what ever tactic they use. Slightly Brechtian I know...but a much more powerful message than rolling around the ground saying that the fight is over. Yes they would probably prefer less people to study the arts...so even more reason for us to make is possible for them.  Therein lies the power of the artist I think.